Two Wheels For Life

The morning of my fifth birthday, I fell off my new bike and cracked my head open on the garage floor.

The bike was my present, but I wasn't allowed to ride it until my dad got home from work. I figured I'd just sit on it, try it out.

The blood stains I left in the back seat of my mother's Maverick on the way to the emergency room never really came out.

And so began my often dangerous love affair with bicycling. The seduction continues this Sunday, as I pedal my first 50 miles on the Great Ohio Bicycle Adventure.

On that day I turned 5, I also received five stitches in my head. It's one of the last entries in my baby book. I thought I was cool, getting five stitches on my fifth birthday. A couple days later, I showed off my skull to all my pre-school peers. A couple days after that, I was on my bike with my dad's steady hand behind the saddle. I never bothered with training wheels.

Speed and balance I figured out quickly. Braking was a little more difficult to master.

Three houses down from mine on Timothy Drive, the sidewalk dead-ended into a grand old oak tree. After a couple of swerving near misses and a couple more collisions with the tree, I decided figuring out the brakes was in my own best interest.

That first bike of mine was a great bike. It was red, with all the finest trimmings: baseball cards in the spokes, the personalized license plate from Honey Combs cereal and the Sugar Bear reflector from Sugar Crisp cereal.

I had other bikes, too, growing, up -- a great blue coaster with fat tires, a red three-speed with dorky fenders, and a silver BMX with Velcro-fastened bar pads. I was in trouble on all of them.

Others were grounded or prohibited from talking on the phone; my regular punishment was having my bike hung up on the garage wall hooks for a week.

And then, for high school graduation, I got my second great bike, a Schwinn. Also red, it's been with me for eight years, racking up hundreds, maybe thousands of miles.

This week, for the first time, I'll keep track. Three hundred miles; 50 miles a day.

Oh, there it is again. You just made the face. The "better you than me" face.

I've seen it a lot lately, and really, this is going to be much easier than it sounds, I'm almost certain.

Let this serve as your official invitation to find out. I'll be filing stories and columns "from the road," for a week, beginning Sunday.